One of the largest car makers in India, Maruti Suzuki is riding the festive cheer with the festive season boosting sales. Maruti has its fingers crossed on the performance of its premium offerings Baleno and S-Cross. Bloomberg TV Indiacaught up with RS Kalsi, Executive Director of Marketing & Sales at Maruti Suzuki, to find out about the Nexa partnership, expansion plans and more.
What is the response your new vehicle S-Cross is getting from the market?
Our S-Cross numbers are in line with our optimistic estimates as it is a cross over. Maruti Suzuki for the first time has introduced the real cross over in its portfolio. I would like to say that it is a wonderful vehicle with all the comfort, sophistication of a Sedan and all the ruggedness and high power of a SUV. It is certainly creating a delight to the customers who have bought it. Moving forward we expect that this product will take off and certainly touch higher numbers.
Festival season has been very good for us and we started preparations much in advance. It started with Onam down South wherein we had very good sales and subsequently in the Central India and Western India we had Ganpati festival, followed by Navratri and Diwali in the Northern India. So if we compare festival season to festival season we had about 17-18 per cent growth.
As I mentioned we started preparing for this festival season and created lots of festivities around our products.
This Nexa concept is an interesting one and you have seen some positive results coming in so far. What are your plans to expand this format? In what way will you work to be able to cater to a larger part of the country where the Nexa showrooms still have not come through?
It is a pan-India marketing strategy. Today, we have 80 Nexa showrooms operating in 60 odd cities. We intend to cross 100 numbers by the end of this fiscal year. In the next year, it will be further ramped up. We are already into tier-2 cities. And based on the customer demand we would be expanding our network.
We have seen you take this game to becoming more of a premium car maker. You are already one of the leaders in the domestic passenger vehicle space, especially the lower end of the market. How do you fair in the premium segment now with Nexa in terms of your own analysis of performance?
I must say that we are gradually evolving. We started with DZire Sedan version of A-3 minus segment where the market was limited to a few thousand numbers.
Today, we have been able to create and develop the market wherein in the entry level Sedan segment we are selling close to 24,000 vehicles per month. Likewise we entered into A-3 premium segment and A-3 plus segment through Ciaz.
Today, we are doing more than 5,000 numbers per month. So we are creating segments and gradually as the market is evolving we are moving upwards in terms of our products.
What is your market share currently? Overall in the premium segment where do you stand? What are the kind of target you have set out as far as the market share goes?
As far as the overall market share is concerned we are at 47 per cent. Our DZire is doing very well and aided by Ciaz we are certainly having a market leadership A-3 segment as well.